Follow the crazy adventures of an Alabama cyclist taking on the Race Across America (again) in 2017.

New (not really) monster

Recall the Birmingham Monsters post that I created a few months back. Well, there is a new monster in town! Not really, as I have done the climb several times, but today I grabbed the stats on it so that I could include it with all the other monsters. My rough definition of a monster is any climb which exceeds 20% for some portion of the climb. Also, a related statistic is the Scanuppia Distance (which is the cumulative distance traveled on the climb where the gradient is greater than or equal to 17%, which is the average gradient for what is arguably the world’s toughest climb – the Scanuppia).

Here is a table with all the monsters sorted by Scanuppia distance. Note that today’s monster (Stoneleigh Dr) has the highest max gradient of all the monsters.

Climb

Distance

Climbing

Scanuppia

Max %

Double Oak Way

3.77 mi

883 ft

0.42mi

23.9 %

South Cove Dr

0.26 mi

229 ft

0.26mi

24.3 %

Hugh Daniel Brae Trail

1.97 mi

614 ft

0.26mi

19.4 %

Southcrest

0.56 mi

299 ft

0.22mi

24.5 %

Vesclub – Vestavia Dr

3.35 mi

793 ft

0.21mi

21.9 %

Woodcrest

1.91 mi

478 ft

0.18mi

21.4 %

Oakdale via Stoneleigh Dr

1.78 mi

548 ft

0.15mi

27.2 %

Montclair (Trinity)

0.38 mi

212 ft

0.13mi

21.8 %

Hugh Daniel Greystone Crest

1.36 mi

371 ft

0.11mi

24.4 %

And here is the topocreator map of the ride I did today with the elevation profile. Note that I did three variations of the Oakdale climb with the Stoneleigh version being the first one. Also, I really enjoyed the Shook Hill climb again today from Rocky Ridge and then climbed it towards the end of the ride for the first time from the Cahaba River in what I called on Strava a “mega stair-stepper” climb.